Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over AI training on song lyrics

Lawsuit details and damages sought

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music filed a 48-page joint copyright infringement lawsuit against artificial intelligence developer Anthropic late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint names Anthropic as a corporate defendant alongside co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The music publishers request a jury trial and seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed musical composition. In addition, the plaintiffs seek civil penalties of up to $25,000 for each instance where Anthropic allegedly removed copyright management information from protected works. If awarded at the maximum statutory rate across thousands of musical works, total liabilities could reach several billion dollars. Representatives for Anthropic did not immediately provide comment on the filing.

Allegations of dataset scraping and torrenting

The plaintiffs state that Anthropic systematically harvested copyrighted lyrics to train its Claude family of artificial intelligence models. According to the court filing, Mann used BitTorrent software to download more than five million pirated books, while other company employees downloaded at least two million additional books from the Pirate Library Mirror repository. The lawsuit also claims Anthropic scraped licensed lyric platforms, including MusixMatch and LyricFind, which pay licensing fees to music publishers. The publishers argue that these downloaded collections included books containing lyrics and sheet music, which were subsequently fed into training datasets. As a result of this ingestion, Claude models allegedly reproduce verbatim lyric text when prompted with specific song titles.

Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic's 'Claude' series of artificial intelligence ('AI') models

Preceding litigation and copyright settlements

This lawsuit follows multiple intellectual property disputes involving Anthropic and content owners across several industries. In September 2025, Anthropic resolved the Bartz v. Anthropic class action brought by book authors and publishers by agreeing to a $1.5 billion settlement. A federal judge in that case ruled that while using copyrighted works to train AI models was legal, acquiring those materials through unauthorized piracy was not permitted. As part of that agreement, Anthropic consented to destroy the pirated copies it had gathered for training data. Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO initially filed suit against Anthropic in 2023, while Concord and Universal filed a separate complaint in January demanding more than $3 billion for 20,000 songs. BMG filed an additional lawsuit in March, followed by independent publisher Round Hill Music earlier in August.

Targeted catalog and legal counsel

The legal filing identifies a broad catalog of musical compositions that plaintiffs allege were illicitly incorporated into Anthropic's training sets. Specific songs listed in the complaint include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings." The publishers also list Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You," Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," and Gene Autry's "Here Comes Santa Claus." Some of the legal counsel representing Sony and Warner previously led both the Bartz litigation and the Universal Music Group action. The plaintiffs maintain that the training process bypassed required commercial licensing agreements across the music sector. Anthropic, Amodei, and Mann have not yet filed formal responses with the federal court.